[B-Greek] Romans 6:3 - baptized into Jesus Christ, word order

Schmuel schmuel at escape.com
Sat Jan 1 11:40:38 EST 2005


Hi b-greek,

  Greetings folks.
  I have a word order question for the forum.

  Generally the English translation phrase "Jesus Christ" and "Christ Jesus" in the NT reflect the word order in the Greek, although I haven not checked the 250 verses or so in total :-)

  One verse where this is not the case ....

Romans 6:3
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? 

   Putting aside Vaticanus, which omits Jesus, virtually every Greek text has "Christos Iesus".  And yet historic Protestant, Reformation Bibles, such as King James, Geneva, Bishops, Coverdale, Tyndale, translated Romans 6:3 with "Jesus Christ".

    Tyndale's translation gives a hint of why this change might be, in the English, by including the implied "the name of"... (parenthesis added)

Remember ye not that all we which are baptised in (the name of )
Jesus Christ, are baptised to die with him?

     We know that phrases that talk of the "name of Jesus Christ" are invariably in that word order, such as the baptism in Acts 2:38 and five other verses.  Perhaps the Romans 6 word order is meant to reflect this understanding.

     Yet that leads to the question of why the Greek has the "Christ Jesus" order, is there a difference in the way the languages "think" about such issues as names ?

     In addition, we do know that Tyndale's excellent Bible had a lot of influence on all the succeeding English Reformation Bible translations, however the Geneva and the King James were definitely done by top scholars who were very familiar with the text, so they would not likely have simply copied a word order without agreement.  I didn't check Luther, which might be interesting, nor all the commentaries, (except Gill) which probably don't discuss word order. 

   Any thoughts from our forum members.  Have you come across other verses where the word order is reversed ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/ 






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